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"Adventurous Female Human" Needed to Give Birth to Neandertal

January 17, 2013

Many Germans are afraid of genetic engineering, according to Spiegel Online, the online offshoot of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, and Harvard's George Church doesn't do much to alleviate those fears.

In an online excerpt of a Q&A published in this week's Der Spiegel, Church talks about recreating Neandertals, engineering humans to live to 120, making people resistant to viruses, and exchanging DNA with other species.

"Like no one else, molecular biologist George Church represents a guild that is prepared to try out anything that can be done, unconditionally," Spiegel Online writes.

According to the site, Church is currently developing technology in his lab that can be used to make human cells similar to those of Neandertals. Eventually, an "adventurous female human" needs to be found as a surrogate mother for the first Neandertal baby, Church is cited as saying, and, from many individuals, "a kind of Neandertal culture" could arise that could gain "political significance."

Church doesn't understand "why many people should be so profoundly upset by these kinds of technologies," since the concept of biological species is currently changing anyway. Up until now, the notion has been that people cannot exchange DNA with other biological species. "But this barrier will fall," he says.


In 2011 in response to The WH

Submitted by lermanmi on Thu, 01/17/2013 - 14:39.

In 2011 in response to The WH request I wrote:
" In the very near future, verily, humans may be genetically modified to carry an additional functional copy of the highly conserved gene, FUS1/TUSC2. I classify it as a Janus (two-faced) type gene that is most suited for prevention and gene therapy of cancer. On one hand it’s a classical tumor suppressor gene (TSG) on the other it’s a powerful regulator of the immune system. Over-expression of this gene will suppress and prevent tumor formation and boost the immune system leading to overproduction of hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) and most effector cells thus activating the immune attack on tumor cells. In addition, individuals with an extra functional copy of the gene will be resistant to immune and infectious diseases including HIV and will enjoy longer lives through its positive effect on the Thioredoxin peroxidase activity."
Michael I. Lerman, M.D., Ph.D.

What would the effects be on

Submitted by mmoser on Thu, 01/17/2013 - 17:32.

What would the effects be on auto-immune diseases from over expression of FUS1/TUSC2 (your favorite gene)that cannot possibly be predicted from a model organism that lives no more than a single decade, or less than than half the time an adult human takes to reach maturity?

The animal (human) genome is only about the size of MS Word, but it is so much more information dense. Your little tweak might encode pleiotropic functions in a genetically heterogeneous population of long lived humans.

Its OK to generate mice with poor health and birth defects, but deformed babies are another thing. Jesse Gelsinger meets Thalidomide? I think it will be quite a while before anyone will want to try direct modification of the human genome.

The living matter is prepared

Submitted by radim.brdicka on Mon, 01/21/2013 - 09:13.

The living matter is prepared to try out anything that can be done ... to survive, but we ?

FYI: More more information

Submitted by jasonbobe_TPG on Tue, 01/22/2013 - 09:24.

FYI: More more information about the exciting work being reported here and the details of the Neandertal civilization being created in Boston, please see:

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/01/harvard_prof...

Jason